A first-line trench outside of Verdun.
From a photograph, copyright by Underwood and Underwood.A first-line trench outside of Verdun.The trench enfilades the valley beyond, and the valley is covered with barbed-wire and gun-pits.
The colonel who commanded the trenches possessed an enthusiasm that was beautiful to see. He was as proud of his chalk quarry as an admiral of his first dreadnaught. He was as isolated as though cast upon a rock in mid-ocean. Behind him was the dripping forest, in front the mud valley filled with floating fogs. At his feet in the chalk floor the shells had gouged out holes as deep as rain-barrels. Other shells were liable at any moment to gouge out more holes. Three days before, when Prince Arthur of Connaught had come to tea, a shell had hit outsidethe colonel’s private cave, and smashed all the teacups. It is extremely annoying when English royalty drops in sociably to distribute medals and sip a cup of tea to have German shells invite themselves to the party. It is a way German shells have. They push in everywhere. One invited itself to my party and got within ten feet of it. When I complained, the colonel suggested absently that it probably was not a German shell but a French mine that had gone off prematurely. He seemed to think being hit by a French mine rather than by a German shell made all the difference in the world. It nearly did.
At the moment the colonel was greatly interested in the fact that one of his men was not carrying a mask against gases. The colonel argued that the life of the man belonged to France, and that through laziness or indifference he had no right to risk losing it. Until this war the colonel had commanded in Africa the regiment into whichcriminals are drafted as a punishment. To keep them in hand requires both imagination and the direct methods of a bucko mate on a whaler. When the colonel was promoted to his present command he found the men did not place much confidence in the gas masks, so he filled a shelter with poisoned air, equipped a squad with protectors and ordered them to enter. They went without enthusiasm, but when they found they could move about with impunity the confidence of the entire command in the anti-gas masks was absolute.
The colonel was very vigilant against these gas attacks. He had equipped the only shelter I have seen devoted solely to the preparation of defenses against them. We learned several new facts concerning this hideous form of warfare. One was that the Germans now launch the gas most frequently at night when the men cannot see it approach, and, in consequence, before they can snap the masks into place, theyare suffocated, and in great agony die. They have learned much about the gas, but chiefly by bitter experience. Two hours after one of the attacks an officer seeking his field-glasses descended into his shelter. The gas that had flooded the trenches and then floated away still lurked below. And in a moment the officer was dead. The warning was instantly flashed along the trenches from the North Sea to Switzerland, and now after a gas raid, before any one enters a shelter, it is attacked by counter-irritants, and the poison driven from ambush.
I have never seen better discipline than obtained in that chalk quarry, or better spirit. There was not a single outside element to aid discipline or to inspire morale. It had all to come from within. It had all to spring from the men themselves and from the example set by their officers. The enemy fought against them, the elements fought against them, the place itself was as cheerful as a crutch. The clay climbed fromtheir feet to their hips, was ground into their uniforms, clung to their hands and hair. The rain chilled them, the wind, cold, damp, and harsh, stabbed through their greatcoats. Their outlook was upon graves, their resting-places dark caverns, at which even a wolf would look with suspicion. And yet they were all smiling, eager, alert. In the whole command we saw not one sullen or wistful face.
It is an old saying: “So the colonel, so the regiment.”
But the splendid spirit I saw on the heights of the Meuse is true not only of that colonel and of that regiment, but of the whole five hundred miles of trenches, and of all France.
February, 1916.
When I was in Verdun, the Germans, from a distance of twenty miles, had dropped three shells into Nancy and threatened to send more. That gave Nancy an interest which Verdun lacked. So I was intolerantof Verdun and anxious to hasten on to Nancy.
To-day Nancy and her three shells are forgotten, and to all the world the place of greatest interest is Verdun. Verdun has been Roman, Austrian, and not until 1648 did she become a part of France. This is the fourth time she has been attacked—by the Prussians in 1792, again by the Germans in 1870, when, after a gallant defense of three weeks, she surrendered, and in October of 1914.
She then was more menaced than attacked. It was the Crown Prince and General von Strantz with seven army corps who threatened her. General Sarrail, now commanding the allied forces in Salonika, with three army corps, and reinforced by part of an army corps from Toul, directed the defense. The attack was made upon Fort Troyon, about twenty miles south of Verdun. The fort was destroyed, but the Germans were repulsed. Four days later, September 24, the real attackwas made fifteen miles south of Troyon, on the village of St. Mihiel. The object of Von Strantz was to break through the Verdun-Toul line, to inclose Sarrail from the south and at Revigny link arms with the Crown Prince. They then would have had the army of Sarrail surrounded.
For several days it looked as though Von Strantz would succeed, but, though outnumbered, Sarrail’s line held, and he forced Von Strantz to “dig in” at St. Mihiel. There he still is, like a dagger that has failed to reach the heart but remains implanted in the flesh.
Von Strantz having failed, a week later, on October 3, the Crown Prince attacked through the Forest of the Argonne between Varennes and Verdun. But this assault also was repulsed by Sarrail, who captured Varennes, and with his left joined up with the Fourth Army of General Langle. The line as then formed by that victory remained much as it is to-day. The present attack is directed neither to the north nor southof Verdun, but straight at the forts of the city. These forts form but a part of the defenses. For twenty miles in front of Verdun have been spread trenches and barb-wire. In turn, these are covered by artillery positions in the woods and on every height. Even were a fort destroyed, to occupy it the enemy must pass over a terrain, every foot of which is under fire. As the defense of Verdun has been arranged, each of the forts is but a rallying-point—a base. The actual combat that will decide the struggle will be fought in the open.
Last month I was invited to one of the Verdun forts. It now lies in the very path of the drive, and to describe it would be improper. But the approaches to it are now what every German knows. They were more impressive even than the fort. The “glacis” of the fort stretched for a mile, and as we walked in the direction of the German trenches there was not a moment when from every side French guns could not have blown us into fragments. They were mounted onthe spurs of the hills, sunk in pits, ambushed in the thick pine woods. Every step forward was made cautiously between trenches, or through mazes of barb-wire and iron hurdles with bayonet-like spikes. Even walking leisurely you had to watch your step. Pits opened suddenly at your feet, and strands of barbed-wire caught at your clothing. Whichever way you looked trenches flanked you. They were dug at every angle, and were not farther than fifty yards apart.
On one side, a half mile distant, was a hill heavily wooded. At regular intervals the trees had been cut down and uprooted and, like a wood-road, a cleared space showed. These were the nests of the “seventy-fives.” They could sweep the approaches to the fort as a fire-hose flushes a gutter. That a human being should be ordered to advance against such pitfalls and obstructions, and under the fire from the trenches and batteries, seemed sheer murder. Not even a cat with nine lives could survive.
A valley in Argonne showing a forest destroyed by shells.
A valley in Argonne showing a forest destroyed by shells.Owing to the attack on the Verdun sector, it is again under fire.
The German papers tell that before the drive upon Verdun was launched the German Emperor reproduced the attack in miniature. The whereabouts and approaches to the positions they were to take were explained to the men. Their officers were rehearsed in the part each was to play. But no rehearsal would teach a man to avoid the pitfalls that surround Verdun. The open places are as treacherous as quicksands, the forests that seem to him to offer shelter are a succession of traps. And if he captures one fort he but brings himself under the fire of two others.
From what I saw of the defenses of Verdun from a “certain place” three miles outside the city to a “certain place” fifteen miles farther south, from what the general commanding the Verdun sector told me, and from what I know of the French, I believe the Crown Prince will find this second attack upon Verdun a hundred per cent more costly than the first, and equally unsuccessful.
Paris,January, 1916.
When speaking of their five hundred miles of front, the French General Staff divide it into twelve sectors. The names of these do not appear on maps. They are family names and titles, not of certain places, but of districts with imaginary boundaries. These nicknames seem to thrive best in countries where the same race of people have lived for many centuries. With us, it is usually when we speak of mountains, as “in the Rockies,” “in the Adirondacks,” that under one name we merge rivers, valleys, and villages. To know the French names for the twelve official fronts may help in deciphering the communiqués. They are these:
Flanders, the first sector, stretches fromthe North Sea to beyond Ypres; the Artois sector surrounds Arras; the centre of Picardie is Amiens; Santerre follows the valley of the Oise; Soissonais is the sector that extends from Soissons on the Aisne to the Champagne sector, which begins with Rheims and extends southwest to include Chalons; Argonne is the forest of Argonne; the Hauts de Meuse, the district around Verdun; Woevre lies between the heights of the Meuse and the River Moselle; then come Lorraine, the Vosges, all hills and forests, and last, Alsace, the territory won back from the enemy.
Of these twelve fronts, I was on ten. The remaining two I missed through leaving France to visit the French fronts in Serbia and Salonika. According to which front you are on, the trench is of mud, clay, chalk, sand-bags, or cement; it is ambushed in gardens and orchards, it winds through flooded mud flats, is hidden behind the ruins of wrecked villages, and is paved and reinforcedwith the stones and bricks from the smashed houses.
Of all the trenches the most curious were those of the Vosges. They were the most curious because, to use the last word one associates with trenches, they are the most beautiful.
We started for the trenches of the Vosges from a certain place close to the German border. It was so close that in the inn a rifle-bullet from across the border had bored a hole in the café mirror.
The car climbed steadily. The swollen rivers flowed far below us, and then disappeared, and the slopes that fell away on one side of the road and rose on the other became smothered under giant pines. Above us they reached to the clouds, below us swept grandly across great valleys. There was no sign of human habitation, not even the hut of a charcoal-burner. Except for the road we might have been the first explorers of a primeval forest. We seemed asfar removed from the France of cities, cultivated acres, stone bridges, and châteaux as Rip Van Winkle lost in the Catskills. The silence was the silence of the ocean.
We halted at what might have been a lumberman’s camp. There were cabins of huge green logs with the moss still fresh and clinging, and smoke poured from mud chimneys. In the air was an enchanting odor of balsam and boiling coffee. It needed only a man in a Mackinaw coat with an axe to persuade us we had motored from a French village ten hundred years old into a perfectly new trading-post on the Saskatchewan.
But from the lumber camp the colonel appeared, and with him in the lead we started up a hill as sheer as a church roof. The freshly cut path reached upward in short, zigzag lengths. Its outer edge was shored with the trunks of the trees cut down to make way for it. They were fastened with stakes, and against rain and snow helped tohold it in place. The soil, as the path showed, was of a pink stone. It cuts easily, and is the stone from which cathedrals have been built. That suggests that to an ambitious young sapling it offers little nutriment, but the pines, at least, seem to thrive on it. For centuries they have thrived on it. They towered over us to the height of eight stories. The ground beneath was hidden by the most exquisite moss, and moss climbed far up the tree trunks and covered the branches. They looked, as though to guard them from the cold, they had been swathed in green velvet. Except for the pink path we were in a world of green—green moss, green ferns, green tree trunks, green shadows. The little light that reached from above was like that which filters through the glass sides of an aquarium.
It was very beautiful, but was it war? We might have been in the Adirondacks in the private camp of one of our men of millions. You expected to see the fire-warden’s red poster warning you to stamp outthe ashes, and to be careful where you threw your matches. Then the path dived into a trench with pink walls, and, overhead, arches of green branches rising higher and higher until they interlocked and shut out the sky. The trench led to a barrier of logs as round as a flour-barrel, the openings plugged with moss, and the whole hidden in fresh pine boughs. It reminded you of those open barricades used in boar hunting, and behind which the German Emperor awaits the onslaught of thoroughly terrified pigs.
Like a bird’s nest it clung to the side of the hill, and, across a valley, looked at a sister hill a quarter of a mile away.
“On that hill,” said the colonel, “on a level with us, are the Germans.”
Had he told me that among the pine-trees across the valley Santa Claus manufactured his toys and stabled his reindeer I would have believed him. Had humpbacked dwarfs with beards peeped from behind the velvet tree trunks and doffed red nightcaps, had wediscovered fairies dancing on the moss carpet, the surprised ones would have been the fairies.
In this enchanted forest to talk of Germans and war was ridiculous. We were speaking in ordinary tones, but in the stillness of the woods our voices carried, and from just below us a dog barked.
“Do you allow the men to bring dogs into the trenches?” I asked. “Don’t they give away your position?”
“That is not one of our dogs,” said the colonel. “That is a German sentry dog. He has heard us talking.”
“But that dog is not across that valley,” I objected. “He’s on this hill. He’s not two hundred yards below us.”
“But, yes, certainly,” said the colonel. Of the man on duty behind the log barrier he asked:
“How near are they?”
“Two hundred yards,” said the soldier. He grinned and, leaning over the top log, pointed directly beneath us.
War in the forest. A cemetery for soldiers killed in the Vosges.
War in the forest.A cemetery for soldiers killed in the Vosges.
It was as though we were on the roof of a house looking over the edge at some one on the front steps. I stared down through the giant pine-trees towering like masts, mysterious, motionless, silent with the silence of centuries. Through the interlacing boughs I saw only shifting shadows or, where a shaft of sunlight fell upon the moss, a flash of vivid green. Unable to believe, I shook my head. Even thebochewatchdog, now thoroughly annoyed, did not convince me. As though reading my doubts, an officer beckoned, and we stepped outside the breastworks and into an intricate cat’s-cradle of barbed-wire. It was lashed to heavy stakes and wound around the tree trunks, and, had the officer not led the way, it would have been impossible for me to get either in or out. At intervals, like clothes on a line, on the wires were strung empty tin cans, pans and pots, and glass bottles. To attempt to cross the entanglement would have made a noise like a peddler’s cart bumping over cobbles.
We came to the edge of the barb-wire, and what looked like part of a tree trunk turned into a man-sized bird’s nest. The sentry in the nest had his back to us, and was peering intently down through the branches of the tree tops. He remained so long motionless that I thought he was not aware of our approach. But he had heard us. Only it was no part of his orders to make abrupt movements. With infinite caution, with the most considerate slowness, he turned, scowled, and waved us back. It was the care with which he made even so slight a gesture that persuaded me the Germans were as close as the colonel had said. My curiosity concerning them was satisfied. The sentry did not need to wave me back. I was already on my way.
At the post of observation I saw a dog-kennel.
“There are watchdogs on our side, also?” I said.
“Yes,” the officer assented doubtfully.
“The idea is that their hearing is better than that of the men, and in case of night attacks they will warn us. But during the day they get so excited barking at thebochedogs that when darkness comes, and we need them, they are worn-out and fall asleep.”
We continued through the forest, and wherever we went found men at work repairing the path and pushing the barb-wire and trenches nearer the enemy. In some places they worked with great caution as, hidden by the ferns, they dragged behind them the coils of wire; sometimes they were able to work openly, and the forest resounded with the blows of axes and the crash of a falling tree. But an axe in a forest does not suggest war, and the scene was still one of peace and beauty.
For miles the men had lined the path with borders of moss six inches wide, and with strips of bark had decorated the huts and shelters. Across the tiny ravines they had thrown what in seed catalogues arecalled “rustic” bridges. As we walked in single file between these carefully laid borders of moss and past the shelters that suggested only a gamekeeper’s lodge, we might have been on a walking tour in the Alps. You expected at every turn to come upon a châlet like a Swiss clock, and a patient cow and a young woman in a velvet bodice who would offer you warm milk.
Instead, from overhead, there burst suddenly the barking of shrapnel, and through an opening in the tree-tops we saw a French biplane pursued by German shells. It was late in the afternoon, but the sun was still shining and, entirely out of her turn, the moon also was shining. In the blue sky she hung like a silver shield, and toward her, it seemed almost to her level, rose the biplane.
She also was all silver. She shone and glistened. Like a great bird, she flung out tilting wings. The sun kissed them and turned them into flashing mirrors. Behindher the German shells burst in white puffs of smoke, feathery, delicate, as innocent-looking as the tips of ostrich-plumes. The biplane ran before them and seemed to play with them as children race up the beach laughing at the pursuing waves. The biplane darted left, darted right, climbed unseen aerial trails, tobogganed down vast imaginary mountains, or, as a gull skims the crests of the waves, dived into a cloud and appeared again, her wings dripping, glistening and radiant. As she turned and winged her way back to France you felt no fear for her. She seemed beyond the power of man to harm, something supreme, super-human—a sister to the sun and moon, the princess royal of the air.
After you have been in the trenches it seems so selfish to be feasting and drinking that you have no appetite for dinner.
But after a visit to the defenders of the forests of the Vosges you cannot feel selfish. Visits to their trenches do not take awaythe appetite. They increase it. The air they breathe tastes like brut champagne, and gases cannot reach them. They sleep on pillows of pine boughs. They look out only on what in nature is most beautiful. And their surgeon told me there was not a single man on the sick-list. That does not mean there are no killed or wounded. For even in the enchanted forest there is no enchantment strong enough to ward off the death that approaches crawling on the velvet moss, or hurtling through the tree-tops.
War has no knowledge of sectors. It is just as hateful in the Vosges as in Flanders, only in the Vosges it masks its hideousness with what is beautiful. In Flanders death hides in a trench of mud like an open grave. In the forest of the Vosges it lurks in a nest of moss, fern, and clean, sweet-smelling pine.
Paris,January, 1916.
At home people who read of some splendid act of courage or self-sacrifice on the part of the Allies, are often moved to exclaim: “I wish I could help! I wish I coulddosomething!”
This is to tell them how easily, at what bargain prices, at what little cost to themselves that wish can be gratified.
In the United States, owing to the war, many have grown suddenly rich; those already wealthy are increasing their fortunes. Here in France the war has robbed every one; the rich are less rich, the poor more destitute. Every franc any one can spare is given to the government, to the Bank of France, to fight the enemy and to preserve the country.
The calls made upon the purses of the people never cease, and each appeal is so worthy that it cannot be denied. In consequence, for the war charities there is not so much money as there was. People are not less willing, but have less to give. So, in order to obtain money, those who ask must appeal to the imagination, must show why the cause for which they plead is the most pressing. They advertise just which men will benefit, and in what way, whether in blankets, gloves, tobacco, masks, or leaves of absence.
Those in charge of the relief organizations have learned that those who have money to give like to pick and choose. A tale of suffering that appeals to one, leaves another cold. One gives less for the wounded because he thinks those injured in battle are wards of the state. But for the children orphaned by the war he will give largely. So the petitioners dress their shop-windows.
To the charitably disposed, and over herethat means every Frenchman, they offer bargains. They have “white sales,” “fire sales.” As, at our expositions, we have special days named after the different States, they have special days for the Belgians, Poles, and Serbians.
For these days they prepare long in advance. Their approach is heralded, advertised; all Paris, or it may be the whole of France, knows they are coming.
Christmas Day and the day after were devoted exclusively to the man in the trenches, to obtain money to bring him home on leave. Those days wereles journees du poilu.
The services of the best black-and-white artists in France were commandeered. For advertising purposes they designed the most appealing posters. Unlike those issued by our suffragettes, calling attention to the importance of November 2, they gave some idea of what was wanted.
They did not show Burne-Jones young women blowing trumpets. They were notsymbolical, or allegorical; they were homely, pathetic, humorous, human. They were aimed straight at the heart and pocketbook.
They showed thepoilureturning home on leave, and on surprising his wife or his sweetheart with her hands helpless in the washtub, kissing her on the back of the neck. In the corner the dog danced on his hind legs, barking joyfully.
They showed the men in the trenches, and while one stood at the periscope the other opened their Christmas boxes; they showed father and son shoulder to shoulder marching through the snow, mud, and sleet; they showed the old couple at home with no fire in the grate, saying: “It is cold for us, but not so cold as for our son in the trench.”
For every contribution to this Christmas fund those who gave received a decoration. According to the sum, these ran from paper badges on a pin to silver and gold medals.
The whole of France contributed to this fund. The proudest shops filled their windowswith the paper badges, and so well was the fund organized that in every town and city petitioners in the streets waylaid every pedestrian.
Even in Modena, on the boundary-line of Italy, when I was returning to France, and sharing a lonely Christmas with the conductor of the wagon-lit, we were held up by train-robbers, who took our money and then pinned medals on us.
Until we reached Paris we did not know why. It was only later we learned that in the two days’ campaign thepoiluswas benefited to the sum of many millions of francs.
In Paris and over all France, for every one is suffering through the war, there is some individual or organization at work to relieve that suffering. Every one helps, and the spirit in which they help is most wonderful and most beautiful. No one is forgotten.
When the French artists were called to the front, the artists’ models of the PlacePigalle and Montmartre were left destitute. They had not “put by.” They were butterflies.
So some women of the industrious, busy-bee order formed a society to look after the artists’ models. They gave them dolls to dress, and on the sale of dolls the human manikins now live.
Nor is any one who wants to help allowed to feel that he or she is too poor; that for his sou or her handiwork there is no need. Themidinettes, the “cash” girls of the great department stores and millinery shops, had no money to contribute, so some one thought of giving them a chance to help the soldiers with their needles.
It was purposed they should make cockades in the national colors. Every French girl is taught to sew; each is born with good taste. They were invited to show their good taste in the designing of cockades, which people would buy for a franc, which franc would be sent to some soldier.
A poster inviting the proprietors of restaurants and hotels and their guests to welcome the soldiers who have permission to visit Paris, especially those who come from the districts invaded by the Germans.A poster inviting the proprietors of restaurants and hotels and their guests to welcome the soldiers who have permission to visit Paris, especially those who come from the districts invaded by the Germans.
The French did not go about this in a hole-in-a-corner way in a back street. They did not let the “cash” girl feel her artistic effort was only a blind to help her help others. They held a “salon” for the cockades.
And they held it in the same Palace of Art, where at the annual salon are hung the paintings of the great French artists. The cockades are exhibited in one hall, and next to them is an exhibition of the precious tapestries rescued from the Rheims cathedral.
In the hall beyond that is an exhibition of lace. To this, museums, duchesses, and queens have sent laces that for centuries have been family heirlooms. But the cockades of Mimi Pinson by the thousands and thousands are given just as much space, are arranged with the same taste and by the same artist who grouped and catalogued the queens’ lace handkerchiefs.
And each little Mimi Pinson can go to the palace and point to the cockade shemade with her own fingers, or point to the spot where it was, and know she has sent a franc to a soldier of France.
These days the streets of Paris are filled with soldiers, each of whom has given to France some part of his physical self. That his country may endure, that she may continue to enjoy and teach liberty, he has seen his arm or his leg, or both, blown off, or cut off. But when on the boulevards you meet him walking with crutches or with an empty sleeve pinned beneath his Cross of War, and he thinks your glance is one of pity, he resents it. He holds his head more stiffly erect. He seems to say: “I know how greatly you envy me!”
And who would dispute him? Long after the war is ended, so long as he lives, men and women of France will honor him, and in their eyes he will read their thanks. But there is one soldier who cannot read their thanks, who is spared the sight of their pity. He is the one who has made all butthe supreme sacrifice. He is the one who is blind. He sits in perpetual darkness. You can remember certain nights that seemed to stretch to doomsday, when sleep was withheld and you tossed and lashed upon the pillow, praying for the dawn. Imagine a night of such torture dragged out over many years, with the dreadful knowledge that the dawn will never come. Imagine Paris with her bridges, palaces, parks, with the Seine, the Tuileries, the boulevards, the glittering shop-windows conveyed to you only through noise. Only through the shrieks of motor-horns and the shuffling of feet.
The men who have been blinded in battle have lost more than sight. They have been robbed of their independence. They feel they are a burden. It is not only the physical loss they suffer, but the thought that no longer are they of use, that they are a care, that in the scheme of things—even in their own little circles of family and friends—there is for them no place. It is not unfairto thepoiluto say that the officer who is blinded suffers more than the private. As a rule, he is more highly strung, more widely educated; he has seen more; his experience of the world is broader; he has more to lose. Before the war he may have been a lawyer, doctor, man of many affairs. For him it is harder than, for example, the peasant to accept a future of unending blackness spent in plaiting straw or weaving rag carpets. Under such conditions life no longer tempts him. Instead, death tempts him, and the pistol seems very near at hand.
All over France, on Christmas Day and the day after, money was collected to send comforts and things good to eat to the men at the front.All over France, on Christmas Day and the day after, money was collected to send comforts and things good to eat to the men at the front.
It was to save men of the officer class from despair and from suicide, to make them know that for them there still was a life of usefulness, work, and accomplishment, that there was organized in France the Committee for Men Blinded in Battle. The idea was to bring back to officers who had lost their sight, courage, hope, and a sense of independence, to give them work not merely mechanical but more in keeping withtheir education and intelligence. The President of France is patron of the society, and on its committees in Paris and New York are many distinguished names. The French Government has promised a house near Paris where the blind soldiers may be educated. When I saw them they were in temporary quarters in the Hôtel de Crillon, lent to them by the proprietor. They had been gathered from hospitals in different parts of France by Miss Winifred Holt, who for years has been working for the blind in her Lighthouse in New York. She is assisted in the work in Paris by Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt. The officers were brought to the Crillon by French ladies, whose duty it was to guide them through the streets. Some of them also were their instructors, and in order to teach them to read and write with their fingers had themselves learned the Braille alphabet. This requires weeks of very close and patient study. And no nurse’s uniform goes with it. But the reward was great.
It was evident in the alert and eager interest of the men who, perhaps, only a week before had wished to “curse God, and die.” But since then hope had returned to each of them, and he had found a door open, and a new life.
And he was facing it with the same or with even a greater courage than that with which he had led his men into the battle that blinded him. Some of the officers were modelling in clay, others were learning typewriting, one with a drawing-board was studying to be an architect, others were pressing their finger-tips over the raised letters of the Braille alphabet.
Opposite each officer, on the other side of the table, sat a woman he could not see. She might be young and beautiful, as many of them were. She might be white-haired and a great lady bearing an ancient title, from the faubourg across the bridges, but he heard only a voice.
The voice encouraged his progress, orcorrected his mistakes, and a hand, detached and descending from nowhere, guided his hand, gently, as one guides the fingers of a child. The officer was again a child. In life for the second time he was beginning with A, B, and C. The officer was tall, handsome, and deeply sunburned. In his uniform of a chasseur d’Afrique he was a splendid figure. On his chest were the medals of the campaigns in Morocco and Algiers, and the crimson ribbon of the Legion of Honor. The officer placed his forefinger on a card covered with raised hieroglyphics.
“N,” he announced.
“No,” the voice answered him.
“M?” His tone did not carry conviction.
“You are guessing,” accused the voice. The officer was greatly confused.
“No, no, mademoiselle!” he protested. “Truly, I thought it was an ‘M.’”
He laughed guiltily. The laugh shook you. You saw all that he could never see:inside the room the great ladies and latest American countesses, eager to help, forgetful of self, full of wonderful, womanly sympathy; and outside, the Place de la Concorde, the gardens of the Tuileries, the trees of the Champs-Élysées, the sun setting behind the gilded dome of the Invalides. All these were lost to him, and yet as he sat in the darkness, because he could not tell an N from an M, he laughed, and laughed happily. From where did he draw his strength and courage? Was it the instinct for life that makes a drowning man fight against an ocean? Was it his training as an officer of the Grande Armée? Was it that spirit of the French that is the one thing no German knows, and no German can ever break? Or was it the sound of a woman’s voice and the touch of a woman’s hand? If the reader wants to contribute something to help teach a new profession to these gentlemen, who in the fight for civilization have contributed their eyesight, write to the secretary of the committee, Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt, Hôtel Ritz, Paris.
A poster advertising the fund to bring from the trenches “permissionaires,” those soldiers who obtain permission to return home for six days.A poster advertising the fund to bring from the trenches “permissionaires,” those soldiers who obtain permission to return home for six days.
There are some other very good bargains. Are you a lover of art, and would you become a patron of art? If that is your wish, you can buy an original water-color for fifty cents, and so help an art student who is fighting at the front, and assist in keeping alive his family in Paris. Is not that a good bargain?
As everybody knows, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris is free to students from all the world. It is the alma mater of some of the best-known American artists and architects. On its rolls are the names of Sargent, St. Gaudens, Stanford White, Whitney Warren, Beckwith, Coffin, MacMonnies.
Certain schools and colleges are so fortunate as to inspire great devotion on the part of their students, as, in the story told of every college, of the student being led from the football field, who struggles in front of the grand stand and shouts: “Let me go back. I’d die for dear old ——”
But the affection of the students of the Beaux-Arts for their masters, their fellow students and the institution is very genuine.
They do not speak of the distinguished artists, architects, engravers, and sculptors who instruct them as “Doc,” or “Prof.” Instead they call him “master,” and no matter how often they say it, they say it each time as though they meant it.
The American students, even when they return to Paris rich and famous, go at once to call upon the former master of their atelier, who, it may be, is not at all famous or rich, and pay their respects.
And, no matter if his school of art has passed, and the torch he carried is in the hands of younger Frenchmen, his former pupils still salute him as master, and with much the same awe as the village curé shows for the cardinal.
When the war came 3,000 of the French students of the Beaux-Arts, past and present, were sent to the front, and there wasno one to look after their parents, families, or themselves, it seemed a chance for Americans to try to pay back some of the debt so many generations of American artists, architects, and sculptors owed to the art of France.
Whitney Warren, the American architect, is one of the few Americans who, in spite of the extreme unpopularity of our people, is still regarded by the French with genuine affection. And in every way possible he tries to show the French that it is not the American people who are neutral, but the American Government.
One of the ways he offers to Americans to prove their friendship for France is in helping the students of the Beaux-Arts. He has organized a committee of French and American students which works twelve hours a day in the palace of the Beaux-Arts itself, on the left bank of the Seine.
It is hard to understand how in such surroundings they work, not all day, but atall. The rooms were decorated in the time of the first Napoleon; the ceilings and walls are white and gold, and in them are inserted paintings and panels. The windows look into formal gardens and courts filled with marble statues and busts, bronze medallions and copies of frescoes brought from Athens and Rome. In this atmosphere the students bang typewriters, fold blankets, nail boxes, sort out woollen gloves, cigarettes, loaves of bread, and masks against asphyxiating gas. The mask they send to the front was invented by Francis Jacques, of Harvard, one of the committee, and has been approved by the French Government.
There is a department which sends out packages to the soldiers in the trenches, to those who are prisoners, and to the soldiers in the hospitals. There is a system of demand cards on which is a list of what the committee is able to supply. In the trenches the men mark the particular thing they want and return the card. The things most in demandseem to be corn-cob pipes and tobacco from America, sketch-books, and small boxes of water-colors.
The committee also edits and prints a monthly magazine. It is sent to those at the front, and gives them news of their fellow students, and is illustrated, it is not necessary to add, with remarkable talent and humor. It is printed by hand. The committee also supplies the students with post-cards on which the students paint pictures in water-colors and sign them. Every student and ex-student, even the masters paint these pictures. Some of them are very valuable. At two francs fifty centimes the autograph alone is a bargain. In many cases your fifty cents will not only make you a patron of art, but it may feed a very hungry family. Write to Ronald Simmons or Cyrus Thomas, École des Beaux-Arts, 17 Quai Malaquais.
There is another very good bargain, and extremely cheap. Would you like to lift a man bodily out of the trenches, and for sixdays not only remove him from the immediate proximity of asphyxiating gas, shells, and bullets, but land him, of all places to a French soldier the most desired, in Paris? Not only land him there, but for six days feed and lodge him, and give him a present to take away? It will cost you fifteen francs, or three dollars. If so, write toJournal des Restaurateurs, 24 Rue Richelieu, Paris.
In Paris, we hear that on Wall Street there are some very fine bargains. We hear that in gambling in war brides and ammunition everybody is making money. Very little of that money finds its way to France. Some day I may print a list of the names of those men in America who are making enormous fortunes out of this war, and who have not contributed to any charity or fund for the relief of the wounded or of their families. If you don’t want your name on that list you might send money to the American Ambulance at Neuilly, or to any of the 6,300 hospitals in France, to the clearing-house,through H. H. Harjes, 31 Boulevard Haussman, or direct to the American Red Cross.
Or if you want to help the orphans of soldiers killed in battle write to August F. Jaccaci, Hôtel de Crillon; if you want to help the families of soldiers rendered homeless by this war, to the Secours National through Mrs. Whitney Warren, 16 West Forty-Seventh Street, New York; if you want to clothe a French soldier against the snows of the Vosges send him a Lafayette kit. In the clearing-house in Paris I have seen on file 20,000 letters from French soldiers asking for this kit. Some of them were addressed to the Marquis de Lafayette, but the clothes will get to the front sooner if you forward two dollars to the Lafayette Kit Fund, Hotel Vanderbilt, New York. If you want to help the Belgian refugees, address Mrs. Herman Harjes, Hôtel de Crillon, Paris; if the Serbian refugees, address Monsieur Vesnitch, the Serbian minister to France.
If among these bargains you cannot find one to suit you, you should consult your doctor. Tell him there is something wrong with your heart.
February, 1916.
Ayear ago you could leave the Continent and enter England by showing a passport and a steamer ticket. To-day it is as hard to leave Paris, and no one everwantsto leave Paris, as to get out of jail; as difficult to invade England as for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. To leave Paris for London you must obtain the permission of the police, the English consul-general, and the American consul-general. That gets you only to Havre. The Paris train arrives at Havre at nine o’clock at night, and while the would-be passengers for the Channel boat to Southampton are waiting to be examined, they are kept on the wharf in a goods-shed. An English sergeant hands each of them a ticket with anumber, and when the number is called the passenger enters a room on the shed where French and English officials put him, or her, through a third degree. The examination is more or less severe, and sometimes the passenger is searched.
There is nothing on the wharf to eat or drink, and except trunks nothing on which to sit. If you prefer to be haughty and stand, there is no law against that. Should you leave the shed for a stroll, you would gain nothing, for, as it is war-time, at nine o’clock every restaurant and café in Havre closes, and the town is so dark you would probably stroll into the harbor.
So, like emigrants on our own Ellis Island, English and French army and navy officers, despatch bearers, American ambulance drivers, Red Cross nurses, and all the other picturesque travellers of these interesting times, shiver, yawn, and swear from nine o’clock until midnight. To make it harder, the big steamer that is to carry you acrossthe Channel is drawn up to the wharf not forty feet way, all lights and warmth and cleanliness. At least ten men assured me they would return to Havre and across the street from the examination-shed start an all-night restaurant. After a very few minutes of standing around in the rain it was a plan to get rich quick that would have occurred to almost any one.
My number was forty-three. After seeing only five people in one hour pass through the examination-room, I approached a man of proud bearing, told him I was a detective, and that I had detected he was from Scotland Yard. He looked anxiously at his feet.
“How did you detect that?” he asked.
“Your boots are all right,” I assured him. “It’s the way you stand with your hands behind your back.”
By shoving his hands into his pockets he disguised himself, and asked what I wanted. I wanted to be put through the torture-chamber ahead of all the remaining passengers.He asked why he should do that. I showed him the letter that, after weeks of experiment, I found of all my letters, was the one that produced the quickest results. It is addressed vaguely, “To His Majesty’s Officers.” I call it Exhibit A.
I explained that for purposes of getting me out of the goods-shed and on board the steamer he could play he was one of his Majesty’s officers. The idea pleased him. He led me into the examination-room, where, behind a long table, like inspectors in a voting-booth on election day, sat French police officials, officers of the admiralty, army, consular, and secret services. Some were in uniform, some in plain clothes. From above, two arc-lights glared down upon them and on the table covered with papers.
In two languages they were examining a young Englishwoman who was pale, ill, and obviously frightened.
“What is your purpose in going to London?” asked the French official.
“To join my children.”
To the French official it seemed a good answer. As much as to say: “Take the witness,” he bowed to his English colleagues.
“If your children are in London,” demanded one, “what are you doing in France?”
“I have been at Amiens, nursing my husband.”
“Amiens is inside our lines. Who gave you permission to remain inside our lines?”
The woman fumbled with some papers.
“I have a letter,” she stammered.
The officer scowled at the letter. Out of the corner of his mouth he said: “Permit from the ‘W. O.’ Husband, Captain in the Berkshires. Wounded at La Bassée.”
He was already scratching his visé upon her passport. As he wrote, he said, cordially: “I hope your husband is all right again.” The woman did not reply. So long was she in answering that they looked up at her. She was chilled with waiting in the cold rain. She had been on a strain, andher lips began to tremble. To hide that fact, and with no intention of being dramatic, she raised her hand, and over her face dropped a black veil.
The officer half rose.
“You should have told us at once, madam,” he said. He jerked his head at the detective and toward the door, and the detective picked up her valise, and asked her please to follow. At the door she looked back, and the row of officials, like one man, bent forward.
One of them was engaged in studying my passport. It had been viséed by the representatives of all the civilized powers, and except the Germans and their fellow gunmen, most of the uncivilized. The officer was fascinated with it. Like a jig-saw puzzle, it appealed to him. He turned it wrong side up and sideways, and took so long about it that the others, hoping there was something wrong, in anticipation scowled at me. But the officer disappointed them.
“Very interestin’,” he said. “You ought to frame it.”
Now that I was free to leave the detention camp I perversely felt a desire to remain. Now that I was free, the sight of all the other passengers kicking each other’s heels and being herded by Tommies gave me a feeling of infinite pleasure. I tried to express this by forcing money on the detective, but he absolutely refused it. So, instead, I offered to introduce him to a King’s messenger. We went in search of the King’s messenger. I was secretly alarmed lest he had lost himself. Since we had left the Balkans together he had lost nearly everything else. He had set out as fully equipped as the white knight, or a “temp. sec. lieutenant.” But his route was marked with lost trunks, travelling-bags, hat-boxes, umbrellas, and receipts for reservations on steamships, railroad-trains, in wagon-lits, and dining-cars.
A King’s messenger has always been to me a fascinating figure. In fiction he isresourceful, daring, ubiquitous. He shows his silver staff, with its running greyhound, which he inherits from the days of Henry VIII, and all men must bow before it. To speed him on his way, railroad-carriages are emptied, special trains are thrown together, steamers cast off only when he arrives. So when I found for days I was to travel in company with a King’s messenger I foresaw a journey of infinite ease and comfort. It would be a royal progress. His ever-present, but invisible, staff of secret agents would protect me. I would share his special trains, his suites of deck cabins. But it was not like that. My King’s messenger was not that kind of a King’s messenger. Indeed, when he left the Levant, had it not been for the man from Cook’s, he would never have found his way from the hotel to the right railroad-station. And that he now is safely in London is because at Patras we rescued him from a boatman who had placed him unresisting on a steamer for Australia.